Damon Galgut: In a Strange Room
Power, love and guardianship…
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize? Where were you when you heard the news?
DG: At home - a friend rang to give me the news.
MBP: In a Strange Room consists of three stories linked together by a single narrator. Were the three stories written quite separately or did you go back and forth between each one as you were writing?
DG: The first two pieces were written ten years ago, in the nineties. The third piece came more recently, a couple of years back. Although they were always meant to fit together and resonate off each other, they were written separately and chronologically - I don't think I could work any other way.
MBP: You've given the narrator your name, and you flit from the third person to the first person, so is the reader to assume that some of these stories are based on personal experience?
DG: That would seem to be what's being signalled, yes. Though I'm happy for readers to interpret this as they like.
MBP: The novel explores how we behave when we're travelling - how our responses differ and how we approach relationships in differently.
How people behave when they're travelling is very much a secondary concern of the book. Far more central is the theme of memory. The narratives have been crafted to convey something of the quality of how memory works, and I would hope that this is the strongest impression people take away. The relationships that are described are also central, of course. Power, love and guardianship - these are the three primary themes of human connection. If you have an emotional bond of any significance with another human being, it's likely to fit into one or more of these 'categories', and I hope they form another unifying theme of the book.
MBP: In a Strange Room depicts the need to travel as being some kind of restlessness. Is this what you've found on your own travels?
DG: Well...I hope the book shows that the compulsion to travel is more complex and contradictory than that. The inability to stay still can run very deep - to the point of defining one's character, in fact.
MBP: You wrote your first novel (A Sinless Season) when you were only seventeen. Are there advantages and/or drawbacks from starting a writing career at that age?
DG: Oh, sure. People notice you because of your age, not because of your literary achievement. That helps in some ways, obviously. But on another level it can give you a false sense that writing is something easy to do, which in my case I had to learn painfully is just not true. And that can rebound on you later as an insecurity about whether you're up to the job at all. I'm not hugely proud of my first novel now, and I wish I'd kicked off with my second book, which it took me a long time to complete. But all of that feels very long ago ...
In a Strange Room
